Skulduggery Pleasant: Kingdom of the Wicked (35 page)

“I’m working on it,” he said.

The drive back to Haggard seemed to take for ever. Valkyrie fell asleep twice, and woke up both times by bouncing her head against the window. “Ow,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Skulduggery. They were on country roads, and his skull was in complete darkness. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “My head feels empty. He just... cut her off from me. I don’t have her any more.”

“If it’s permanent, that could be a cause for celebration.”

“But Darquesse and Vile might have been our only weapons against him.” She sighed. “What are we going to do? This isn’t as clearcut as usual. Kitana and Doran and Sean and Silas Nadir... those are the people we’re used to dealing with. Killers. People who hurt other people. But Argeddion... he’s not like them.”

“Argeddion is as dangerous as anyone we’ve faced,” Skulduggery said. “He may not be out to physically hurt us, but his goals are just as damaging. We need to treat him just like any other hostile.”

“Would you kill him?” asked Valkyrie. “He’s a pacifist who only wants to help people. And there’s no guarantee that mankind
would
destroy itself. It might all work out according to Argeddion’s plan. Who are we to say it won’t?”

“Are you willing to take that risk?”

“I just... I don’t feel right about this. He wants to make the world a better place and we want to keep the world as it is. That doesn’t sound particularly... heroic.”

“We have to maintain the status quo, Valkyrie. It’s not our job to change the world. That’s for the mortals to do.”

“So you
would
kill him?”

There was a pause. “I believe his plan would result in billions dead. Yes, I would kill him.”

“I… I don’t think I could.”

He turned his head to her. “I’m not asking you to.”

The Bentley pulled in at the pier and Valkyrie got out. It was just past ten but she was exhausted. The air lifted her to her window and she climbed in. Her room was empty. She sat at her desk, where schoolbooks lay open. She yawned, and her reflection came in. It shut the door behind it.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” it said back. “You look like you’ve had a rough day.”

“Rough enough.”

“Where’s your jacket?”

Valkyrie glowered. “I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to go to bed. You finished our homework?”

It shook its head. “Another half-hour or so, I’d say. Can you wait until then?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll go for a walk, actually.” She got up. “Hey, I want your opinion on something.”

“Sure,” said the reflection, stepping towards the mirror.

“No,” said Valkyrie. “I want your opinion as the reflection of me the last time I was here, not as the reflection of me now. If you know what I know, then your perspective will be my perspective, and I don’t want my perspective. I want your perspective.”

“For anyone else, that would be overly complicated. OK. What do you want your old perspective on?”

“Argeddion is out. He’s free. He wants to make every mortal magic and live in a kingdom of enlightenment and righteousness. It sounds lovely, to be honest, but according to Skulduggery and the others, it’d never work and we’d all end up killing each other. But he’s really powerful, and the only way we had to stop him was to...”

“Become Darquesse,” said the reflection.

“Yes. But I can’t do that any more. He got in my head, he blocked her off. I can’t Hulk out and Argeddion took Skulduggery’s armour, made it vanish. It’s not destroyed, or else all the Necromancer magic would return to Skulduggery, but it’s hidden.”

“You’re disappointed.”

“Argeddion’s at least as powerful as Darquesse. We needed her.”

“Needing her is dangerous.”

“I know.”

“You might have been able to stop Argeddion, but who would stop
you
?”

“Hopefully, Skulduggery.”

“He’d have put on the armour and gone after you? After what happened last time?”

Valkyrie collapsed back into her chair. “I don’t know. Yes. He did it before.”

“He stopped you, eventually, after you both tore up O’Connell Street. You tried to kill people. You tried to take down a helicopter. And what about Skulduggery? When he puts on that armour, he’s a killer. You know he is.”

“But last time—”

“Last time was a fluke,” the reflection said. “Somehow, he managed to regain control of himself and he talked you down. But if you let her take over again, she won’t go so quietly next time.”

“Well, we don’t have that option any more.”

“That shouldn’t have even
been
an option. Argeddion has a plan that
might
backfire – but your plan was to send two killers after him? What’s the term that was used before? World-breakers? You were going to send two world-breakers after him? There is a risk of his plan going wrong and resulting in death and destruction. But if you had unleashed Darquesse, you’d be
guaranteeing
that people would die.”

“Skulduggery would have stopped me.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“I trust him.”

“And that’s the problem.”

“What? What’s the problem?”

The reflection hunkered down and rested her folded arms on Valkyrie’s knees. “China told you once that Skulduggery would kill you without hesitation if he had to. He’d sacrifice anyone for the good of the mission. When you realised you were Darquesse, this was practically a comfort. You knew that if things got bad enough, you could rely on Skulduggery to put a bullet in your brain to stop you from killing your parents.”

“That’s ridiculous. I never—”

“You can lie to yourself,” the reflection said, “but you can’t lie to me.”

Valkyrie shut her mouth.

The reflection continued. “But things have changed. Your relationship with Skulduggery has deepened, you know it has. You know the lengths he would go to for you, and that’s the problem. Valkyrie, he would sacrifice the world to save you.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“No,” said the reflection. “But it’s what you suspect.”

“He wouldn’t let me do that. He just wouldn’t.”

“Maybe not. But he’d waste time. He’d second-guess himself. He’d look for another way. He wouldn’t go for the kill shot when he was given the chance, and by then, it might be too late. You don’t have that reassurance any more. It’s the two of you against the world. But that’s not what you need. You need him with his finger on the trigger, and the gun to your head. You should be thankful Darquesse is no longer an option. I can’t see how it could have ended well.”

Valkyrie sighed. “How am I supposed to know what to do?”

“You’re not,” the reflection said gently. “You’re seventeen. You’re supposed to be dealing with school and hormones and dim-witted parents. You’re supposed to be finding out who you are as a person.”

“But I already know who I am,” Valkyrie said. “I’m a world-breaker.”

She changed her clothes. It was still warm outside so she pulled on jeans and a different T-shirt and went for a walk along the pier, listening to the dark waves against the rocks, then turned and walked up into Haggard. She passed the takeaway that had sprung up when the Pizza Palace had gone out of business. The video shop was gone, too. A lot of things had changed in the last five years.

Carol Edgley came out of the takeaway holding a steaming bag of food. She saw Valkyrie and hid the bag behind her back. “Hi, Stephanie,” she said. She was blushing.

Valkyrie gave her a smile. “Hiya, Carol. Oh my God, that smells amazing.”

“Uh, do you... do you want to share?”

“Would you mind? Just one or two.”

Carol hesitated, then brought the bag out and opened it. She offered it to Valkyrie, who took a small handful of piping hot chips. Her stomach rumbled; she realised she was starving. She blew on them a few times before eating.

“These are so good.”

Carol smiled, and had a few herself. They walked towards the corner of Main Street, where the road split.

“How are things?” Valkyrie asked.

“Good,” Carol said. “Grand.”

“How’s your mum?”

“Fine. She joined a bridge club.”

“I didn’t know she liked bridge.”

“She doesn’t, but ever since we started defending you she needed a wider range of people to disapprove of.”

Valkyrie took another few chips, and grinned. “You know, if it makes your life any easier, you can always go back to agreeing with her.”

“No. No way. Those days are gone. Look at everything we missed out on because we were too busy being selfish. Gordon chose you to have all these adventures. He could have easily chosen us if we’d been nicer or cooler or, I don’t know, happier. It’s like Mum just kind of trained us to be miserable. Dad spoiled us and Mum was a bad example and look how we turned out. And then look at your mum and dad. They’re cool, and funny, and weird, and genuine. They’re genuine, y’know? Mum isn’t genuine.”

They walked along for a bit, with Carol eating her chips and Valkyrie looking at her. “She’s not
all
bad.”

“No,” Carol said. “She isn’t. She’s my mum, and I love her, but she’s not a nice person. You mightn’t think we realise that but we do.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Valkyrie admitted. “I don’t want to agree with you, because that’d be mean. And I can’t really argue...”

Carol laughed, and Valkyrie smiled.

“But no one’s perfect,” she continued. “My folks can get just as annoying as anyone’s.”

“But you had a head start,” Carol said. “They gave you that, and that’s what makes them cool. They didn’t spoil you. They criticised you when you needed it. They didn’t treat you like you were this little princess that only they could see. You were way more independent at twelve than we are even now. Do you understand that? The twelve-year-old version of you was more of a grown-up than I am right now, aged twenty.”

“I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself.”

They reached the corner and Carol turned to her. “Look at me, Valkyrie. I mean, just look at me. I’m a slob.”

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s ten o’clock on a Wednesday night and I’m walking home with a bag of chips, just like I do every night. I’m fat. I’ve always been fat and I’ve always hated being fat but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. I start diets but they’re too hard so I stop, and eat more. I’m fat and Crystal is thin, she’s way too thin and she won’t listen to me, she won’t believe me when I tell her she’s too skinny. She always says no, she hasn’t reached her target weight yet, and she gets thinner and thinner and I can see her bones now. I know you’re used to that with Skulduggery, but it’s a lot different when it’s your sister.”

“Yeah.”

“And then we look at you. Even from here I can see the muscles on your arms.”

“I have to be strong to do what I do. If I wasn’t involved in all this, I’d be just like you guys.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d still be tall, for a start, and you’d probably be swimming every day or horse-riding or something.”

“Well, that’s all
you
need to do. Whenever I’m not working on a case with Skulduggery, I train really hard. I practise magic, I fight, I lift weights, I work out. Every few months Skulduggery brings in another friend of his who’s an expert in some fighting style I’ve never heard of and I get thrown about the place. Whatever muscles I have I got through hard work and sweat. And I hated most of it. But all you have to do is find the activity that you enjoy and you won’t care about how hard the work is.”

“I’ve... I might have found an activity.” Carol looked away. “I’ve been, kind of… I’ve been practising magic.”

Valkyrie raised an eyebrow. “I see.”

“Just the fire stuff,” Carol said quickly. “I’m not really good with the air, and I don’t know about the water and earth, but I can click my fingers and sometimes things go on fire.”

“Sounds... dangerous.”

“I keep a bucket of water beside me when I do it.”

“Listen, I don’t want to tell you not to practise. I don’t have that right. You have magic in you, it’s part of your heritage, just like it’s a part of mine. But you’re taking a risk every time you do it. What if your mum sees you? Or your dad? They’d freak out, Carol. They’d call every emergency service they could think of. You could get into a lot of trouble.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“Can you at least try not to set fire to anything? That’s going to raise some suspicions sooner or later.”

“I won’t do it in the house any more.”

“OK. Thank you.”

“Do you want another chip?”

Valkyrie smiled, and took one.

“Are you working on a case at the moment?” asked Carol.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Anything exciting?”

“A few days ago I wrestled an Abominable Snowman.”

“No way!”

Valkyrie grinned. “Yep. That was pretty cool. Really bad breath, though. Like, disgusting.”

“Eww.”

“And I’ve been to an alternate universe.”

“Seriously? Like on
Star Trek
?”

Valkyrie laughed. “Since when do you know about
Star Trek
?”

Carol looked around, like someone might be listening, then leaned in. “Don’t tell your parents, but Mum loves
Star Trek
. When we were kids, we used to watch the reruns of the original series,
Next Generation
,
DS9
... She liked
Voyager
more than we did, and none of us liked
Enterprise
... But she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s a Trekkie, so...”

“I promise I won’t tell, no matter how amused it might make me.”

“Thank you. So what was the alternate universe like? Are there evil versions of everybody? Is there an evil version of me?”

Valkyrie laughed. “Sadly, no. Our histories ran parallel up to a few hundred years ago, so none of us have been born.”

“Oh. That sucks.” Carol ate another chip. “Wouldn’t it be cool to find out what your evil version would be like?”

Valkyrie made a face. “Not really...”

She walked Carol back to her house and they finished off the bag of chips. Carol told her about this guy she liked in college, and they giggled and laughed and when Carol walked to her front door, she had a bounce in her step, and looked lighter than her frame would suggest. Smiling to herself, Valkyrie took the little lane down to the beach and walked back to her house along the sand. She got to her room, the reflection went back into the mirror, and she stripped down to underwear and a T-shirt and climbed into bed. Sleep came quickly.